Conviva is the only real-time analytics platform for streaming TV consumption, engagement, and viewer experience across every second, every stream, and every screen. Conviva's products support 50 billion streams per year across 3 billion applications with over 200 million viewers worldwide.

The Conviva Platform processes 1 trillion data events per day across 200 global brands in real time. This platform is the industry’s only real-time, AI-based alerting and diagnostics solution at TV scale.

Conviva supports partners across all phases of the video delivery chain. From CDNs to ISPs to player frameworks and more, Conviva’s SDK collects everything the video delivery ecosystem needs to help the industry better deliver streaming video over the internet.

Conviva’s sophisticated data and intelligence provide crucial insights into the industry and are trusted by some of the world’s top publishers. Conviva truly is the measurement standard for streaming TV.

Anatomy of a Metric

July 6, 2018

Anatomy of a Metric

Every moment of every day across the globe, Conviva provides measurement and analytics services to many of the world’s leading streaming TV publishers and distributors. At the heart of these measurements and services, Conviva’s rich body of Quality of Experience (QoE) and audience metrics empower accurate, timely, and actionable intelligence to maximize viewer engagement and satisfaction.

Dissecting the common structure and body of each metric reduces the complexity of the metric definition, and clarifies the how the metric can be interpreted and correlated for actionable, data-driven insights. We have upgraded our metric definitions and compiled them to a single reference for customers (the Metric Dictionary in Conviva’s Experience Insights Help Center) that clarifies the definitions of each key metric, along with the metric’s viewer experience impact, session calculation, data aggregation, and related distributions.

Viewer Experience Impact

On the surface, the most important aspect of any metrics is the measured impact on viewer experience. Viewer impact may be clearly visible in the form of the dreaded spinning wheel caused by rebuffering, or less perceptible as with the correlations between play duration and rebuffering ratios.

As an example, Video Start Failures measures how often Attemptsterminated during video startup before the first video frame was played, with a reported fatal error.

Session Calculation

Once the data points of the viewer impact are captured, the brains of a metric process the data. With some metrics this calculation is basic summation (Attempts), while for others the computation is more complex with several sequences of data processing (Average Bitrate).

Data Aggregation

Furthermore, to derive a complete metric value the calculations aggregate the individual the video session with data across multiple sessions. This aggregation often consists of summing the individual sessions and then computing a percentage or average that represents the metric value for all the sessions in the selected period.

Distributions and Correlations

Distributions and correlations further enhance Conviva’s metrics to help you correlate viewer experience and video session performance, e.g., play duration and end plays with rebuffering tolerance.

Additional actionable intelligence may also come from grouping sets of individual. For example, in many cases the pairing of Average Bitrate, Rebuffering Ratio, and Video Start Failure can illustrate an optimized balance between viewer experience and video delivery performance.

Join Conviva’s developer community, where we will present one of our key viewer engagement or QoE metrics as the metric-of-the-month so you can get to know our metrics better.